Tag: mental health

Sharon Jean Cretsinger

Love among Survivors: Bastille Day 2014 (July 13-16)

Day two, Tuesday, begins overcast and noisy. The racket from the various kinds of traffic on Holland Avenue is getting in my skull and rattling around with the voices that have recently rejoined me from the ward, the clinic and the root cellar. I stayed up all night with activists Kathy, Lauren and George, holding the vigil for those who have been killed, incarcerated, incapacitated and silenced by psychiatry. I walk up the street to the hotel where the other vigil participants are staying, and slide into my psychiatric patient mind. The voices are too loud. The traffic is too close. God, I need some pills. Can I get off the street before someone notices that I need to be locked up?

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Alyza Taguilaso

The Pill

She is small and elongated – capsule couching the deep-seated hurricanes of your heart. She hails from medicine mothers and Martians alike, feels like beads of a rosary at your fingertips.

She is split into two colors. One half is orange and the other is white – two halves of your fractured whole.

She is centuries of claims for happiness and how this can all go away if you just followed the right instructions. She means you sought professional help (despite being a problematic professional yourself).

She is pink. She is red or blue. Your colorblind lover asks which of her you placed into your mouth. You swallow before answering.

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Call for Submissions: MITA’s 2027-2028 Featured Writer Project

Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2027-2028 writing year, which will begin in January 2027.

This is a non-competitive call for submissions, open to writers from any location across the globe; all who wish to be featured writers and who fulfill the submission guidelines will be included in this project and archive. MITA seeks to offer a space in which veteran writers write alongside novice writers as a form of literacy and advocacy to dismantle stigma and support gender-marginalized people affected by the mental health system, trauma, and stigma. The project features women and other gender-marginalized writers and artists who have been affected by the mental health system, psychiatric diagnostic or other mad-related stigmatizing labels, trauma, or forms of societal oppression that have been othering or alienating.

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Emily Wu Truong

From Lady in Green to Psychiatric Survivor:
How 988 Shattered My Trust in the Mental Healthcare System

By Emily Wu Truong

For over a decade, I devoted my life to mental health advocacy. I believed in change — in compassion, in awareness, in recovery. My journey began with my local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), where I first found community when my family did not know how to be a support to me. Later, I connected with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) and joined the California Mental Health Movement, back when it was still called Each Mind Matters.

As part of their campaign promoting the lime green ribbon for mental health awareness, I became known as the Lady in Green. They featured my story. I felt validated. I spent years fighting stigma, amplifying AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) voices, delivering nearly 200 talks, and working within a system I believed could help people heal.

In 2022, when the national 988 crisis line launched, I called and texted the line to test it — to better understand what others in crisis might experience. A year later, I called again. But this time, it wasn’t a test.

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Tiara Raven Marie Clover

Blood for Water: Hands

I could begin with how I often lay in bed thinking about the blood running down my arms while looking out at the flowers from my window. I could trace my laying out to the fact that we don’t talk about Jerry. Jerry, who supposedly was cleaning his gun in the laundry room and the gun went off.  I could talk about the ways the story changes over time from person to person.

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2025 December Letters Project

It’s that time of year: December Letters Project preparation time!

We invite you and/or your families, clubs, organizations, schools, and communities to be part of MITA’s – 2025 – December Letters Project. This is MITA’s annual local literacy project, but we encourage others to run a December Letters Project in their local communities if you’re not local to the greater western New York region.

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Lee Blackbird

Ode to my kidneys

Until recently, I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t think about you or worry about you. You were my unsung lifeline.

But now, you are showing signs of exhaustion. I feel you, nestled somewhere beneath my rib cage, one of you on each side, breaking a little bit more each day. I feel you, dying.

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